What is
Literature?
English 239
Professor
Alisse Theodore
Winter 2000
The course information and schedule of assignments for
this
course are now available at
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~alisse/ENGL239w00.html.
Please note that the course description below is a slightly revised (and
more accurate)
description than the one provided in the on-line guide
by
the English
Department.
Hello. If you are here, you are probably considering taking this
section of "What is Literature?" in the winter term. Although I won't
have a schedule of assignments ready until December, you can get a
sense of my teaching philosophy and thoughts for this course by
looking at the website for the section of English
239 that I am teaching right now (fall 1999).
Please note that a few things--for example, the list of books we will
read and the kind of writing we will do--will be different. To get a
sense of the difference, you may want
to compare winter term's course description (given below) to
the
first few paragraphs
of the fall term's course information.
If you have questions, feel free to email me.
Good luck with the rest of your fall term.
Course Description for English 239, Winter 2000
**Note: This course description is slightly modified from the description
published by the English Department.**
What is literature? In this class, we will read, discuss, and write
about
five American texts, probably Frederick Douglass's Narrative of
the Life
of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; Mary Austin's Stories
from
the
Country of Lost Borders; Gertrude Stein's Three Lives; Ralph
Ellison's
Invisible Man; and Walker Percy's The Second Coming.
Though the texts are quite varied,
each of course uses
language to express ideas and shape meanings. Who has access to such a
powerful tool? Who doesn't? How does the way something is expressed--for
example, its style, the patterns of the language, a particular narrative
focus--shape the meanings we make? And why does any of this matter? In
our exploration of these issues, students will participate in class
discussions and work on their own writing, producing ocassional short,
informal
writings for homework (less than 1 page each) and three papers (3-5
pages each).
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~alisse